


Brothers In Arms

by fanoftheknight



Series: More Than Words [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-28 00:37:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20769608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fanoftheknight/pseuds/fanoftheknight
Summary: A one-shot based on the story that Thoros tells Daenerys in chapter 13 of More Than Words.





	Brothers In Arms

**Author's Note:**

> Some people expressed an interest in the one-shot from Thoros POV in chapter 13 of More Than Words, and so here it is...
> 
> It's not essential to have read MTW before reading this, but it will probably make a lot more sense if you're already familiar with the setting/context of the overall story.

He’d seen the kid on point go down seconds before he heard the gunshot.

Thoros swore under his breath as the young man crumpled to the ground, holding his bleeding abdomen and wailing like a child.

“There’s a fucking sniper around here somewhere,” he shouted to his Captain who nodded and silently directed his men to take cover in a nearby abandoned building.

“Cover me, Sergeant,” the Captain shouted, running headlong toward their injured comrade.

Thoros didn’t have time to argue the point about his commanding officer’s blind stupidity before he perched his machine gun on his shoulder and he let out a spray of bullets in the general direction that the sniper’s shot had come from.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Thoros muttered as the sniper took aim once more, except this time, there seemed to be more than one of them.

Throwing his gun back over his shoulder, Thoros helped his Captain drag the screaming man back into the relative shelter of the desolate building as bullets continued to whizz around them.

“Get on the radio and get an evac sorted,” the Captain commanded as he began tearing off the injured man’s body armour.

Thoros wasn’t much of a medic, but even he could see that the kid didn’t stand much of a chance. Despite the Captain’s best efforts, blood was spilling over his hands faster than any meaningful pressure could be applied.

“I’m gonna die,” the young man screamed, squirming under the Captain’s hands. “I’m gonna fucking die out here.”

They were all going to die out here if the fucking kid didn’t shut up soon.

“Peters,” the Captain said as he pushed down harder on the man’s stomach. “Peters. Listen to me. You need to keep still, ok?”

“It hurts,” Peters screamed. “I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!”

Thoros shot his commanding officer a look, an unspoken agreement that they had to keep the kid calm or none of them would make it out alive.

“Peters. Look at me,” the Captain commanded. “Look at me!”

Thoros knew that the men would do anything their captain asked.

The boy’s glassy eyes finally landed on their commanding officer’s face.

“Did I ever tell you the story about the dragon queen and her loyal knight?”

Thoros stifled a groan. Mormont and his fucking stories!

The kid shook his head. “No, Captain,” he said in a breathy whisper.

The Captain nodded. “Well, she was an exile from the land of Westeros. Her and her brother had been sent across to the East after their father and brother were murdered. They were the last surviving members of an ancient dynasty….”

Thoros began tuning out the Captain’s words as he checked with the other two men in their patrol unit.

“Any word on the chopper yet?”

The radioman shook his head. “They said they’d send it as soon as they can.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Thoros muttered. “Do they know we have a situation here?”

The radioman shrugged. “I’ll send another transmission.”

They all knew that it would be too late for the kid on the floor.

Thoros heard the Captain’s words trail off and crawled back over to find the kid had died, but he could have sworn that he had a smile on his face.

“He was never going to make it,” Thoros said as he looked at his commanding officer sympathetically.

The Captain nodded slowly and had pitched back before Thoros had known what was happening. It was then that he saw the strange grey tinge to the Captain’s face and the beads of sweat on his brow.

“Captain,” he said in a panicked voice. “Where are you hit?”

He watched as the Captain shook his head slowly. “I’m not,” he mumbled.

Thoros ripped the kevlar vest away and found the right side of the Captain’s shirt stained heavily with blood. He ignored the man’s wince as he tore the shirt open.

“Fuck me,” Thoros whispered, seeing the glinting tip of the steel-tipped sniper’s bullet poking through the flesh under the Captain’s collarbone.

Thoros cursed under his breath. The fucking snipers were using bullets that could penetrate even the toughest kevlar vests.

He turned the Captain onto his side, ignoring the man’s pained moans and found a small entrance wound just underneath his right shoulder blade. He was bleeding from both sides and there was so much blood that Thoros couldn’t work out which side was worse.

He turned the Captain onto his back and grabbed a clean dressing from the small medic kit they had. He ignored the cry of pain as he pushed down hard on the wound.

The Captain screwed his eyes shut, letting out a pained breath. “Is it bad?”

Thoros had to laugh, knowing what the Captain’s idea of bad would be. The man could be missing three limbs and half of his intestines and would still insist to everyone that he was fine.

“Well, you’re lucky you’re a fat fucker. It might be what saved you,” Thoros quipped.

“Fuck you,” the Captain ground out as he grimaced in pain.

Every man in at the base knew how fit the Captain was and how he could run rings around the younger men. Whether it was rugby or football, no one wanted to be on the opposing team to the Captain. The man was built like a bear and would run through tackles like his opponents were not even there. He was solid but the weight he carried was lean muscle and not fat like most of the other commanding officers at the base.

As the minutes ticked by, Thoros began to grow concerned at the shivering that seemed to pervade the Captain’s body. He shook the man’s shoulder as he caught his eyes beginning to close.

“You need to stay awake, Captain.”

“Fuck off and let me sleep,” the Captain grumbled as he tried to push Thoros’ hand away.

“I can’t do that, Captain.”

He couldn’t help it, he was starting to panic now.

“If you don’t take your fucking hands off me, I’ll have you pulling latrine duty for a month, Sergeant.”

The Captain’s words were increasingly slurred.

Thoros looked at his surroundings and let out a humourless laugh. “I guess I’ll swap one shithole for another then.”

“You….you do that,” the Captain whispered, his eyes shutting once more.

“Where the hell is that fucking chopper?!” Thoros screamed at his comrades. He could see that the other two men were starting to panic now too.

“Keep your voice down.”

Thoros laughed as he saw the Captain open his eyes again.

“That story you told Peters,” Thoros began, letting out a shaky breath. “Tell me what happens next.” He shook the Captain’s shoulder in an effort to rouse him. “Captain, tell me what happens next.”

It took several attempts, but the Captain picked up halfway through whatever he’d been telling Peters.

“The dragon princess is sold by her brother to a great warlord and at the wedding ceremony she meets a tall, handsome knight. He’d been exiled from Westeros too.”

“Why?”

He could see the Captain’s eyes grow heavy again. “Why what?”

“Why was the knight exiled?”

“He broke an ancient law….but he did it for the woman he loved….but then she left him.”

“The bitch,” Thoros snorted. “What happens to the princess and her not-so-noble knight?”

“It’s a really long story,” the Captain’s voice whispered before he coughed, a trail of blood spilling from his mouth.

“Her….” The Captain wheezed. “Her warlord husband dies….she walks into his funeral pyre with…the three eggs she’d been given….as a wedding present. She walks out…with three small dragons…and not a burn on her.”

“Fuck me.”

Another trickle of blood spilled from the Captain’s mouth. “The princess….and the knight…they travel further east to….”

The Captain closed his eyes. Thoros shook his shoulder roughly in an effort to rouse him. It was then that he heard the rotors of the chopper close by.

“Captain,” Thoros said as he shook the man roughly. “You’re just getting to the fucking good bit, you can’t leave it there.”

The derelict building soon filled with other men and Thoros felt himself being pushed out of the way as medics swarmed around the Captain.

Before long they had been bundled into the chopper and Thoros could do nothing but watch as the medics jabbed needles and ran lines into his commanding officer’s unmoving body.

———————

The flight back to base had been one of the worst that Thoros could remember. A veteran of four previous tours to this shithole, he’d seen more carnage than most. He’d lost colleagues and friends, he’d seen men blown to pieces by carefully hidden bombs and buried more good people than could ever be justified.

But he’d never been as frightened than when he watched those medics thumping on his captain’s chest as they attempted to force the man to breathe through sheer will alone. Thoros knew it had been bad by the frantic way they threw the Captain on the stretcher and ran back to the chopper. He didn’t need a medical degree to know that the man was in serious trouble.

Thoros had felt his own heart stop when he heard the whining noise from the portable heart monitor they’d connected the Captain to. Soon there were a flurry of hands, tubes and needles all over the man who was not only his commanding officer, but also his friend.

It caused Thoros physical pain to watch as the medics shoved a tube down his friend’s throat, syphoning away the blood that had been slowly choking him. He watched in dazed fascination as the blood hit the floor of the chopper with a wet slap.

“You can’t die on us, you tight bastard,” Thoros shouted over the sound of the rotors. “You still owe me £100 from the poker game!”

True to his Scottish nature, Captain Mormont was a man who was tighter than a duck’s arse in water when it came to money - especially paying out after losing a hand at their regular poker nights back on the base.

The Captain would always claim that he’d been cheated if he lost a hand, yet he was the biggest card shark of them all. The Captain was an honest and noble man, but a bastard when it came to the cards.

The chopper landed suddenly and with a thud with Thoros finding himself having to jump out of the way as the medics pulled the stretcher roughly from the chopper and ran towards the medical tent.

As they ran into the distance, the adrenaline began to wear off and Thoros felt his hands begin to shake uncontrollably.

“Thoros, you ok?”

He turned round at the sound of the familiar voice of Lieutenant Beric Dondarrion.

Thoros shook his head. “I need a drink.”

———————————

The next morning, Thoros woke with a pounding head and a mouth as dry as the Afghan sun.

He groaned as Beric shook him by the shoulder.

“Are you conscious yet?” His colleague said as he looked him over.

He’d fallen asleep in his fatigues after he and Beric had downed a bottle of whiskey between them. Well, to be fair, it had been himself doing most of the imbibing.

“What time is it?” Thoros groaned as he ran a hand roughly over his face.

“Time you were up and reporting for duty,” Beric growled as he rolled his eyes. “You’re lucky the Captain’s not here to catch you skulking around in bed.”

And then it hit him again. The utter carnage of yesterday’s patrol when everything had gone so horribly wrong.

Thoros jumped out of his bunk, immediately regretting it when his stomach decided to lurch backwards.

“I need to get over to the medical tent,” he said as he grabbed his boots and pulled them on, tying the laces haphazardly.

“That’s why I came to get you, Thoros.”

Thoros suddenly felt his heart sink. “Oh god, don’t tell me…”

He couldn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t want to give voice to what he already feared. That they’d got to him too late, that they hadn’t been able to save him.

“Relax,” Beric said as he placed a hand on his shoulder. “I went over there first thing. He’s alive.”

Thoros cocked an eyebrow. “Just alive?”

Beric shrugged. “I didn’t stay around long enough to find out. I came to get you.”

He and Beric had known each other for years and it seemed as if the man subconsciously knew how much the Captain’s injury had affected him. He’d deny it until he was blue in the face of course, but Beric knew how deeply some friendships could run when you shared a trench with another man.

They made their way quickly over to the medical tent and Thoros grabbed the first medic he could find.

“We’re looking for Captain Mormont,” he said without preamble. He didn’t have time for pleasantries.

“And good morning to you too, solider,” the young, heavyset man said with a huff.

Sensing the situation might get out of control, Beric pushed Thoros out of the way.

“Excuse Thoros here…erm…Tarly,” he said, reading the man’s name from his shirt.

“Corporal Tarly,” the young man corrected.

“Corporal,” Beric repeated with a placating smile. “Would you be able to give us an update on our commanding officer please?”

With his black hair, goatee and round face, Corporal Tarly did not look like a regular solider. He was far too heavy to be able to deal with even one day out on patrol, let alone carry a firearm or dig a latrine.

Corporal Tarly nodded stiffly. “Follow me…?”

“Lieutenant Dondarrion,” Beric, he supplied as they followed the medic through several areas until they came to a series of beds, all with injured soldiers in them.

“Captain Mormont is doing as well as can be expected,” Tarly said as he walked them over to their commanding officer.

“What does that mean?” Thoros growled, instantly disliking the young medic.

Tarly let out a tired sigh, having already had his fill of aggressive soldiers during his tour so far.

“The bullet entered his back below the shoulder blade and stopped just below the collarbone,” Tarly said as he pointed out the area on his own chest.

“I know that already, I was fucking there!” Thoros let out in a low whisper, his patience already running thin with the man. 

Tarly looked at them nervously. “As I was saying,” he began as he shot Thoros a look, “The bullet ended up just underneath his collarbone. It did some damage to the muscles surrounding the area and chipped the collarbone itself, all of which are fairly minor in the context of things. However, the bullet also punctured his lung, which was why he was having so much trouble breathing.”

“But you can fix that?” Beric asked as he looked at his commanding officer lying still in the bed with wires and tubes snaking out from underneath the sheets.

Tarly nodded. “We already have,” he said as he lifted the clipboard from the end of the bed before pressing a number of buttons on the machine at the other end. “We inserted a chest tube to drain the excess blood and release the air pressure that had built up, we also re-inflated the lung and gave him several units of blood.”

“So he’ll be ok?” Thoros asked, all pretence of aggression now gone.

“He’ll be here for a while, but as long as he keeps still and rests, he should be fine in time.”

“When will he be awake?” Dondarrion asked. His captain hadn’t moved the whole time they’d been there.

Tarly scribbled on the clipboard before returning it to the end of the bed. “We’re giving him a light sedative to keep him comfortable and calm and we’ve been reducing it overnight, so hopefully waking up won’t be as much of a shock,” Tarly said. “Especially under the circumstances that he was injured. I’m guessing being out there on the front lines is not a pleasant experience and if he pulls that chest tube out, he’s not going to like us having to reinsert it, especially if he’s conscious.”

Thoros felt his anger dissipating toward the young medic. There were so many men on base that had never set foot outside of their tents, leaving it to the real men to go out and risk their lives on a daily basis. He had no time for cowards and laziness, but at least this kid seemed to acknowledge the sacrifice made by the men who went out on patrol every day.

“Come back later this afternoon,” Tarly said. “He’ll probably be awake by then.”

———————— 

By the time Thoros and Beric had returned, the Captain was very much awake and definitely agitated.

“Easy, Captain,” Beric said as he placed a hand on his uninjured shoulder.

“Where the fuck am I?” The Captain growled, wincing at the pain in his throat.

“We’re back at base camp,” Thoros replied. “We made it out, Captain.”

Their commanding officer looked confused for a number of moments before closing his eyes and letting out a pained breath.

“Peters…” the Captain said as his eyes closed momentarily, “the sniper…”

Thoros nodded mournfully.

“I remember Peters being shot…” the Captain groaned. “How the hell did I end up here and why the fuck can’t I move my arm?”

Thoros looked down and saw that the whole of his commanding officer’s right arm was wrapped tightly to his chest, leaving him unable to move the limb in any way.

“You don’t remember getting shot?” Beric asked.

The Captain shook his head, clearly confused.

“You took one in the back,” Thoros said, swallowing deeply and trying to keep his voice level. “You nearly bled out on me, you mad bastard.”

The Captain grimaced. “I could write you up for talking to a superior officer like that, Sergeant.”

Thoros shrugged. “Feel free. You’ve already put me on latrine duty for a month anyway.”

The Captain arched an eyebrow at that, before his eyes drifted shut. “I did? You must have deserved it.”

“Aye, Captain,” Thoros smiled. “You were pissed that I wouldn’t let you sleep.”

“You never did know when to shut the fuck up,” the Captain mumbled as he used his free hand to grab at the wires and tubes covering him.

“Easy, Captain,” Beric said as he grabbed for the man’s left hand and placed it back on the bed.

The Captain tried to pull his arm away. “I’ll fucking write you up too if you don’t let go of me,” he growled at his lieutenant, annoyed to find his strength failing him.

“For fuck’s sake, Captain, just lie still will you?” Thoros said under his breath, knowing that his commanding officer making a commotion would soon be heard by the medics.

“I have to call Peters’ family,” the Captain said as he tried to make another bid for freedom, only to collapse back on the bed with a gasp at the feel of the tube in his chest pulling at his insides.

Beric leaned over the bed and into the Captain’s line of sight. “It’s already been taken care of, Captain.”

The previous spurt of energy seemed to drain from the Captain quickly as he let out a pained breath. “I can’t just lie here and do nothing,” he grumbled.

“Well, for once in your sorry life, you’re going to have to, Captain,” Beric said as he saw his commanding officer’s eyes close and his breathing even out.

————————

Five days after that fateful patrol, Thoros caught sight of his commanding officer finally leaving the medical tent, still moving gingerly and with the right arm of his shirt draping over the injured area.

Thoros ran to catch up with his captain. 

“They finally let you out I see?”

The Captain huffed. “I didn’t exactly give them much choice.”

Thoros knew his colleague too well. Mormont was an absolute bastard when he’d set his mind to something. The medics had likely discharged him just to keep him quiet.

“Nah, I reckon they only kicked you out because your fucking ugly mug was making the other patients even worse.”

The comment earned a rueful smile from the Captain. “How would you like another month’s worth of latrine duty, Sergeant?”

Thoros sobered immediately. “As long as you never fucking scare me like that again, Captain. I’ll dig shit pits for the rest of my tour if you keep your arse out of the firing line.”

The Captain chuckled. “And let you boys have all then fun? I don’t think so.”

“Seriously, Captain. You’ve got your stripes, there’s no need for you to be out on patrol every day.”

The Captain chuckled. “There’s every need. I won’t send my men out there alone. There’s no honour in being a coward.”

“There’s no honour in being a dead man either, “ Thoros shot back.

The Captain squeezed Thoros’ shoulder with his good arm. “I appreciate the concern, but there are men here who have wives…children. I’d never be able to look their families in the eye and tell them how brave and courageous their son was if I didn’t go out there with them myself.”

“What about your family?” Thoros asked. He knew it was a thorny subject and not one the Captain was keen on talking about, especially after his wife’s passing and the loss of his unborn child.

“I don’t have any,” the Captain sighed.

“What about the Colonel?”

He saw the Captain wince at the mention of his father.

“Leave it, Thoros. That’s an order.”

The look on the Captain’s face made it clear that he wouldn’t tell him again.

“No one can survive in this world alone, Captain. No one.”

The Captain nodded his head and gave Thoros a sad smile as he turned to walk away.

“I expect to see you at roll call tomorrow at 0600 hours, Thoros. Don’t be late,” the Captain called over his shoulder.

Thoros shook his head and promised himself that the Captain would always have a family, even if it was only his brothers in arms. He would not let a good man walk alone and certainly not a man with the honour and courage of his captain.

“Will you at least tell me the end of that story?” Thoros called out to the retreating figure.

The Captain laughed, then winced at the pain it caused his wounded side. “When I’ve written it, I’ll let you know.”


End file.
